The Company
Low online sales conversion rates. Inefficient customer service. These are the problems FlamingoAI is solving with its game-changing technology. With our training data powering its virtual-assistant platforms, the machine learning company now creates better online experiences for its financial and insurance-industry clients—and their customers.“With our platform, consumers get to have these conversations in natural language.” –Dr. Jack Elliott FlamingoAI Chief Data Scientist
The Challenge
FlamingoAI specializes in “conversational commerce” technology for enterprises. The company’s artificial intelligence-based virtual assistant platforms help financial services and insurance companies automate online customer experiences for higher satisfaction scores, better sales conversion rates, and lower costs. With offices in New York and Sydney, FlamingoAI has seamlessly combined instant messaging, smart workflow, natural language processing, and machine learning to automatically serve customers online, guiding them through a chat-based sales process or service experience. “With our platform,” says chief data scientist Dr. Jack Elliott, “consumers get to have these conversations in natural language. In turn, we learn from those conversations and automate them, ensuring that our assistants keep getting better at helping customers find and get what they need.”
The Solution
How well the virtual assistants perform right out of the gate in these “cold start” situations depends on their training. They need to learn the ropes by fielding the same kind of natural language questions that customers would ask. To get those questions, FlamingoAI turned to us based on our reputation for delivering high-quality training data to leading technology firms around the world. Our first project for FlamingoAI was a project just like this for an Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) 100 Australian financial services firm. We sourced a group of native Australian-English speakers, and asked them to provide questions, comments or responses based on a specific step in a customer journey or process such as applying for superannuation. The questions we provided stood in for the real-world data FlamingoAI didn’t have time to collect, and when fed to the virtual assistant, successfully prepared her for the interactions she had once she went live on the customer’s website. As a result, the end customers’ experiences were greatly improved by interacting with the virtual assistant instead of using a static web form. FlamingoAI also deployed its virtual assistant fully automated from day one, and pre-trained on data we provided, at a US-based Fortune 100 client. After just seven weeks, the virtual assistant was responding to over 80% of all customer questions and was converting life insurance quotations at about a 30% success rate.
The Result
FlamingoAI successfully solved the cold-start problem, deploying completely autonomous virtual assistants that worked from the outset without any human training. For this reason, FlamingoAI has found that the benefit of working with us goes beyond simple money or time savings. “It’s an all-out capability thing,” says Elliott. “You can’t be a machine learning firm that develops core IP and also sources key data the way Appen does. Ultimately, you have to specialize in one or the other. Appen gives us the ability to focus on our business, while they take care of the data sourcing.”
